As Hurricane Katrina raised a watery fist almost 30 feet high and shook it at Biloxi, Miss., as a nightmare of wind and ocean took shape off New Orleans, as millions of people fled for their lives, huddled in fear or made peace with God, Brownie sought fashion advice.

“Tie or not for tonight?” he asked an aide via e-mail. “Button-down blue shirt?”

You remember Brownie, of course: Former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown – forever “Brownie” after a few ill-fated words of support from President Bush: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Days later, Brownie was out of work, the national consensus being that he had not done much of a job at all in managing the federal response to Katrina. Though he remains on the government payroll – supposedly because his expertise is needed to help in the investigation of FEMA’s bungling – Brownie doubtless is updating his resume.

I imagine the job search will be a hard one, what with his name being all over a foul-up of historic proportions. Nor will last week’s release of e-mail he wrote immediately before, during and after the disaster make Brown’s life any easier.

It reveals that as the worst U.S. natural disaster in modern memory took shape around him, Brown was looking for a dog sitter (“If you know of any responsible kids, let me know,”) worrying about his image (“If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god”) and wishing he were elsewhere (“Can I quit now?”)

A couple of caveats here:

One, anyone’s e-mail, released to public scrutiny, probably would make him or her look silly. It’s the nature of the medium – e-mail often serves as a repository for the detritus of cluttered minds.

Two, the excerpts were released by a House panel at the behest of Rep. Charlie Melancon, a Democrat from Louisiana. In other words, hardly a disinterested observer.

But even granting all that, Brown’s exchanges ought to raise eyebrows. I mean, how do you rationalize the note from an aide advising him to “roll up the sleeves of your shirt” to “look more hard-working” on television? As if, in this moment of crisis, Brown’s image were what mattered most.

Then there’s the message from Marty Bahamonde, FEMA’s only “boots on the ground” representative in New Orleans in the first days after the storm, who described a situation “past critical.” People were dying, food was gone, water was going, the homeless and hungry were massing in the streets.

To which Brown’s response was: “Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?”

Tweak?

As revealed last month, it was three hours after Bahamonde had sent his message about thirst and hunger in New Orleans that an aide to Brown wrote her colleagues about the need to free up enough time in the director’s schedule for him to have dinner because restaurants in Baton Rouge, La., were crowded and “he needs much more than 20 or 30 minutes.”

Which prompted Bahamonde to message a co-worker: “I just ate an MRE” – meal ready to eat, or military rations – “and (went to the bathroom) in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends, so I understand her concern about busy restaurants.”

Perhaps Bahamonde can be forgiven for being a tad bitter.

You can line up all the caveats you want on Brown’s side of the ledger, but you still are left with an agency chief – and, thus, an agency – stunningly detached from, and callously unmoved by, the suffering they were supposed to address. New Orleans was being engulfed and Brownie was picking out ties?

But what else can you expect when a man with no experience in disaster relief is put in charge of disaster relief because he had an “in” with the president?

It helps to have friends in high places, I suppose. Too bad the Gulf Coast didn’t have a few.